Report on APEE --- The Promise of the Youth Movement

Last weekend I attended the annual meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) in Las Vegas.   I have been attending APEE meetings for several years now and value the contributions of the association greatly --- especially the opportunity it affords to graduate students and young economists just starting out in their research/teaching careers.  In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I have served on the board at APEE,  in 2005 I was honored to receive the distinguished scholar award from the society, and this year they invited me to give one of the main lectures, so I could be accused of simply home team cheering.  The association has been very supportive of my work and also the work of my students.  But I must say in all honesty that the APEE meetings get better every year.  This year they had 60 more participants than last year, and the quality of papers continually improves.  And the most exciting thing to see is the graduate students and the young scholars that are now starting to make their mark.

An analysis of this youth movement will see two major networks at work. First, there is the Florida State University (Jim Gwartney, Bruce Benson) node.  From this comes Russ Sobel, who now at West Virginia University has established another node, with a team of graduate students and now also Pete Leeson (who actually links back to two other nodes we will discuss).  Out of the FSU node also comes Bob Lawson, now of Capital University in Ohio.  Another node is the Texas A&M folk (Tom Savings and going back further in the history of APEE Steve Pejovich).  From Texas A&M comes Bruce Benson, but also several GMU PhDs who went to Texas A&M for undergraduate study --- this would include Ed Lopez and Noel Campbell.  Lopez is now at San Jose State University, which is now one of the most represented institutions at APEE, with Ed Stringham, Ben Powell, Jeff Hummel, and several MA students from their program.  And we cannot forget the PERC crowd from Montana, with Jane Shaw and Rick Stroup figuring prominently.  Finally, there is the GMU crowd.  I love competition and I must say at the opening dinner I was taken aback by the seemingly reduced dominance of GMU at APEE, so I started to do some counting and network analysis.  Once you start drawing connections from former GMU students, former GMU professors, and existing GMU faculty and students, the picture starts to emerge that the two most important networks in the society come from FSU and GMU, but that now the WVU and SJSU derivatives  of FSU and GMU are establishing their own independent nodes that are just as, or in fact more important, for the advancement of APEE (and I would say free market economic thought in general).

The range of ideas being researched theoretically and empirically by all these different intellectual nodes is very impressive.  Economic Freedom research is obviously a central topic, but so are questions of the entrepreneurial market process, the conditions under which self-governance is sufficient, the mechanics of economic development, the role of monetary policy in a free society, the fiscal dimension, and the consequences of the regulatory environment on economic performance.

The bottom line: everyone who is interested in free market oriented research/teaching in economics and political economy should join APEE and attend the meetings and contribute to the continuing advancement of APEE.

Congratulations to Edward Stringham for organizing a wonderful conference in Las Vegas, being appointed President of APEE, and assuming the editorship of the Journal of Private Enterprise.

Comments

[Rafe]

This is truly exciting news when you look back to the conference of 1974 that signalled the Austrian revival and see what has happened since. The message to the world is "you aint see nothing yet!"

I would like to plan a trip to the US in the next 12 months and get face to face with some of the people in those different nodes.

[Steve Miller]

I was very impressed with the WVU students as well. Those who presented at APEE are all doing very good work in applied political economy. Further, they balance technical skill with very strong economic intuition. Obviously Sobel's influence is the main reason for the energy in those students, but Leeson's influence was also apparent in many of them. I found that most remarkable and encouraging, especially since he's only been there for less than two semesters.